


i'm fine (if you are fine)

by orphan_account



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Anxiety, Established Relationship, Fluff, Isle of Man, M/M, early morning strolls by the sea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-03 04:48:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17277356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: But the sun is rising now, streaks of orange and gold spread across the candyfloss-coloured sky, shards of light catching in the sea below. Their faces are pink from the climb, and pressed together on the bench the December chill doesn’t seem so bad. They can see for miles from their seat. He doesn’t want to be cynical about everything any more.[the morning before dan leaves the isle of man for christmas, he thinks about the future]





	i'm fine (if you are fine)

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from 'mine' by the 1975.

Dan would never admit it out loud, but he really loves the Isle of Man. He made a show of faux-reticence in their liveshow, but the truth was Kath didn’t have to ask twice. No longer being faced with the prospect of sitting alone in the quiet of their flat, or worse, going home early to patchy wifi and family tension, was like a heavy weight lifted off his heart he hadn’t known he’d been carrying. He loves his family sure, but going back to his hometown just reminded him of all his failures, past, present and future - a reminder of where he’ll surely end up when the YouTube bubble bursts and he comes crashing back down hard. 

_Phil would never let that happen._

He thinks of all the times Phil’s come to his aid, all the times they’ve had eachother’s backs; early days in university halls and top secret radio show meetings and two world-stage-shows and one - two - three apartments across two cities now. He’s only been on the island a few days, and already he never wants to leave. Spending the last few days before Christmas together reminds him of just how _far_ they’ve come.

But the thought of his flight home this afternoon is making his chest thrum with anxiety. He tries not to toss and turn in their narrow double bed, but he’s been awake an hour now, and all he’s thinking of is how to rebut those awkward questions at the dinner table at home, comments about his appearance, his job, his health, thinking about whether or not to blank the people he went to school with when he sees them in the street-

_C’mon Dan. You’re an adult now._ And he has been for quite some time now, but he never really quite _feels_ like one.

“Are you awake?” Phil’s voice cuts across the darkness of the room. The alarm clock’s sinister red glow spells out 06:45. His monotone rumble is clearly half-asleep, and the fear in Dan’s chest punches into guilt.

“Yeah, sorry.” He turns over to face Phil. It’s not _that_ early, but it’s practically the middle of the night by their standards and the gap in the paisley-patterned curtains shows it’s pitch dark out. Phil’s eyes are open though, and Dan can’t hold his sympathetic gaze in the low light. “I might just get up.”

He’s not packed yet, he thoroughly doesn’t intend to until about three minutes before the car leaves, but he needs to do something to settle his racing mind. The room is too dark, there’s nothing to focus on, not even Phil. He sits up, closes his eyes, breathes deeply and slowly like he’s been taught to, but it’s not really working.

“We could go for a walk?” Phil suggests, sitting up too, reaching out for Dan’s hand in the darkness.

And that’s how Dan ends up with the brisk sea air whipping at his face, clambering along the shoreline. They’d done the same walk yesterday, Phil’s family in tow, and they’d taken perfect photos for thousands online, sun sinking lower in the mid-afternoon sky.

The walk is different this time though. The cusp of the sunrise on the horizon, slicing sea from sky. The air is sharper, fresher now. It catches in the back of Dan’s throat in a way that the haze of London never could. There’s less conversation this time too. Phil’s still half asleep, and Dan still feels bad about getting them both up so early, but he knew Phil would never let him wander off across the island by himself, not when the paths rose uneven and his thoughts swirled too ragged. The crash of the ocean on rocks below hums like white noise.

It’s calming though, the upward climb, the way the light grows all around them. They haven’t seen a single soul since they set off, and there’s something in the cool December stillness that Dan relishes. Phil’s at his side, a buffer between the crumbling path and the sheer drop, and Dan reaches out a gloved hand in silence.

There’s a bench at the top, one of those brown wooden memorial ones with tired slats and a shiny brass plaque for someone’s late grandparents, married for decades. Rest in peace, they loved this view.

They’d walked past this bench yesterday, with a brief stop for Phil to retie his shoelaces before he tripped off a cliff into the Irish Sea, and Dan had barely registered it, a brief glance at how nice the view was before they headed inland to a more officially-designated vantage point.

But this time he stops, brushes his fingers over the plaque. He wonders, a little morbidly, if people will build a bench for him and Phil. _Where will they put it?_

_“_ If we get a bench, I bet they’d put it in that creepy underpass by our old apartment in Manchester,” Phil says, leaning in to read the writing, his voice croaky from underuse. Dan smiles; Phil always did have a way of reading his mind. 

“No way,” Dan says, crinkling his nose as he sits down gently on the bench. “We’re gonna get one in every city we’ve toured in. Maybe even a brass statue of us outside YouTube HQ.” Phil sits down next to him, drapes an arm across his shoulders.

“You do realise if they do that, we’ll both be wearing cat whiskers, and they’ll engrave your old username underneath it for posterity?” Phil turns to him smirking, his nose bright red in the cold.

_Things are changing,_ Dan thinks as he fixes his gaze on the horizon, the rising mass of the mainland a dark stripe against the watercolour sky. _The end of Pinof, a hiatus for the gaming channel._ Announcing it all at once in a livestream seemed like the best way, ripping off the plaster instead of slow orchestrated announcements. _And change is a good thing, right?_ He rests his head against Phil’s shoulder, warm and steady against the cold clear dawn, staring out at the sunrise.

There’s something about the sea that always unsettled him, the way it stretches out around and ahead of them, fathoms deep. The unknown is never something he’s dealt particularly well with, he knows that. Potential for Phil is like a bright shining star, a beacon overhead guiding them into the future, always tantalisingly just out of reach. But to Dan, it’s more like a black hole, an ever-consuming darkness of unpredictable events waiting to trip him up. _That’s the thing about being cynical_ , he’d once announced, younger and tipsy and brimming with melodrama, _you’re either proven right or pleasantly surprised.  
_

But the sun is rising now, streaks of orange and gold spread across the candyfloss-coloured sky, shards of light catching in the sea below. Their faces are pink from the climb, and pressed together on the bench the December chill doesn’t seem so bad. They can see for miles from their seat. He doesn’t want to be cynical about everything any more.

“At the risk of sounding stupid,” Dan says, his voice a mumble onto the wind. “I don’t want this to end.” He feels impossibly young again, eighteen and waiting on a platform in Manchester, scanning the crowds for Phil’s friendly face, the bright shape of his hoody. Standing on the threshold of the future. Who’d have thought they’d be like this, nearly ten years on. _A decade of us._

Phil looks at down him, tilts his head, a quirk of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. Dan stares back, tracing his eyes over Phil’s face, committing every little detail to memory, filed away in his mind forever. The rising golden light casts them both aglow, two lovers on top of the world. Phil always had that curious quality of knowing exactly what Dan meant, even when he himself hadn’t quite figured it out.

“Me either,” Phil says, his voice low and still, pressing a kiss into the top of Dan’s bobble hat. “It’s gonna be a good year though.”

Dan thinks of all the things they have planned for the upcoming year, all the things they’re gonna do and see and experience. And everything stretching ahead of them into the future Dan can’t even imagine yet, a house, a dog, settling down, and all of it t _ogether._ For eighteen years he didn’t even have a best friend and now he has a thousand futures with Phil all waiting to happen. The thought makes him giddy, the excitement flutters in his chest.

_Change is a good thing_ , he reminds himself yet again, pressing his lips to Phil’s.


End file.
